Sometimes, when the Government is tearing itself to pieces trying to confront a problem such as immigration, you get wise heads in the media pointing out that the Conservatives have really created the problem for themselves by talking about it. Given they didn’t intend to do any of the hard work of actually bringing the numbers down, why not make life easier and not draw attention to it?
The career of Mark Drakeford, who announced yesterday that he was stepping down after five years as First Minister of Wales, seems to testify to both the benefits and the costs of this head-in-the-sand approach. His ministry has been, in policy terms, bad for his country; yet he resigns with his party’s hold on power largely intact, which cannot have taught any good lessons to his potential successors.
Last week we looked at the latest PISA rankings, a standardised international metric for school performance organised by the OECD. Wales was the worst-performing home nation across all three of reading, maths, and science. Nor was the slump merely in comparative terms: the BBC reports that: “Wales’ performance has fallen to its lowest level”.
Not all of this is Drakeford’s fault. As I set out in more detail in last week’s column, he inherited twenty years’ of accumulated policy failure in education, kicked off by Welsh Labour in the late 1990s when they used the advent of devolution to abolish league tables and opt out of New Labour’s school reforms.
But he didn’t do anything about it. Indeed, he very much embodied the mindset which brought about that original “self-inflicted Welsh education debacle”. Too often the priority seemed to be doing things differently to England, even at the expense of doing them quickly or better; the decision to delay food deliveries to vulnerable people by weeks at the start of the pandemic, for the sake of having a separate scheme, was an especially petty example of the mindset.
The list goes on. In a handy list of graphs charting Wales’ problems under Drakeford, the Daily Telegraph shows how the gap between median NHS waiting times in England and Wales as widened enormously, despite (as with education) the latter receiving thanks to the Barnet Formula more public funding per head than the former.
Healthcare isn’t a new problem either. It was in 2015 that David Cameron branded Offa’s Dyke “the line between life and death”, and that was only the year an entire Welsh NHS trust embarked on five years in special measures (it’s now back in them again!).
Again, however, there has been no call for radical action. Nor on rising crime rates, nor on the shrinking economy.
But why should their be? Labour remains the hegemonic party in Wales, at least at the level of the Senedd; Plaid Cymru have struggled to break out of their Welsh-speaking heartlands, whilst the Conservatives have still after 25 years not found a way to get hundreds of thousands of their devosceptic voters, who turn out for them at general elections, to cast their vote in devolved ones.
Day to day, the system works, at least for those at the top of it. With no standardised collection of data on public services across the UK, Cardiff can normally adjust the way it measures performance to make unflattering cross-border comparisons impossible; when a Westminster figure tries it anyway, devocrats can wave the flag and sling accusations of colonialism.
And if all else fails, one can always exploit people’s hazy grasp of the complexities of devolution to shift blame to London and claim the solution is more powers and more (British taxpayers’) money for yourself.
It’s a comfortable, flattering model – especially compared to the alternative. A serious plan to tackle any of the problems above-listed would mean both admitting the real scale of the problem and that the Welsh Government has the powers needed to do something about it, which isn’t an appealing prospect.
It would also mean taking on a lot of vested interests, which would produce a lot of outraged coverage about how your government was no longer being solid and sensible and grown-up, and fighting some major internal battles within your party, which would be hard and look bad.
(This same dynamic also explains why it is always so tactically convenient for devocrats to start aping the nationalists, as Welsh Labour have done; there are strong structural incentives to shift blame, make endless demands of the centre, and hide failure behind the flag, rather than take ownership of devolved policy or defend UK-wide programmes.)
Day to day, it is much more congenial to be a “steady hand on the tiller”, even if this is a terrible quality in the captain of a ship going in the wrong direction. It tends to be only when the (political) consequences of the accumulating failure start to bite that there is any pressure to change course, and Wales does not seem to be there yet. If you’ve managed to maintain a “distinctive, winning brand” without any of that work, why do it?
So why would any of Drakeford’s potential successors change course? Especially with Labour looking likely to win next year’s general election, at which point British ministers will no longer have any incentive to shine unwelcome lights on their colleagues’ performance in Wales.
Indeed, the Daily Mail reports claims that Sir Keir Starmer is sufficiently sensitive to the potential damage Labour’s record in Wales could do to the national party that he faces accusations of having “forced out” the First Minister.
But if so that seems purely about optics, not performance – there is nothing in Gordon Brown’s mooted constitutional overhaul that would give a Labour prime minister any new levers to try and drive up outcomes in Wales, even as Parliament handed over more cash than ever every year.